In a post entitled, “Automated Emails: Are You Launching a Denial of Service Attack on Your Own Company,” tech reporter Brian Proffitt addresses the issue organizations are beginning to encounter as they attempt to migrate email to the cloud without considering the hundreds, if not thousands, of undetected systems and apps that pass automated emails back and forth within and beyond corporate walls.
Quoting Sendmail’s very own CEO Glen Vondrick, the post acknowledges that “applications can generate hundreds of messages per second,” and “if something goes wrong, a mail storm can create a denial-of-service-like attack on the company’s own servers.”
Talk about bringing down the business from the inside.
The post goes on to say that properly managing traffic on corporate networks can ultimately save big organizations from big headaches, but that you “have to know where to look.”
One large financial institution recently discovered through Sendmail that they had as many as 10,000 of these email-generating apps and systems. If they had tried moving email to the cloud without addressing their systems dependence on email, many aspects of their business would’ve come to a halt. Other organizations haven’t been so lucky.
But, Proffitt agrees that “out-of-sync timestamps and simple network topology changes can also throw off these apps’ messages,” meaning chaos may not just be a matter of cloud migration.
For you and your organization, it may just be a matter of time.